


Weird

by ckret2



Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [11]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Bittersweet, Interspecies Relationship(s), Language Barrier, M/M, Misunderstandings, One Shot, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, the fanfic form of Boy That Escalated Quickly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-15 22:49:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21026024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: Yesterday, Ghidorah attempted to cuddle Rodan.It freaked him the hell out.Rodan—who still doesn’t know that Ghidorah isn’t a member of his own species, still doesn’t know that Ghidorah is an alien, and still doesn’t know that what happened yesterday was a cuddle attempt—is beginning to realize just how very little he knows about the creature that’s been sharing his island, and how dangerous that might be.So he goes to a friend to help sort out his head.





	Weird

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted July 31.
> 
> This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. If you don’t wanna read the others, all you need to know is: Ichi’s the one that developed the crush on Rodan and Ni’s less keen on it it; Ghidorah is a mild empath (telepathically reads/projects emotions); and Rodan doesn’t refer to _anyone_ by their canon names because his species names people based on the volcano/island/geological feature they call home.

When he was flying at just the right angle, from the corner of his eye Nido could catch a flash of gold on his right shoulder, reflecting in the sunlight.

It made his stomach do loops that the rest of his body couldn't quite keep up with.

A smear on one shoulder, the shape of a face on his chest, a silhouetted neck and head curling down his back. Three golden impressions, left by the golden one in his stone skin. What did it mean? Was he being claimed? Decorated? Was it an accident? It _felt_ like a claim, but it was hard to tell with the golden one. He was just...

He was so _weird_.

It wasn't a surprise that he was weird. He had three heads, that excluded him from anything remotely approaching the category of normal. He’d been weird the second he showed up. But still. Even on top of that. Nido couldn't have anticipated the multitude of ways he'd be weird.

He couldn't talk. He was currently struggling to learn how. Some words he couldn't say normally at all; it took two heads, trading off the syllables, to make those words recognizable. He'd yet to provide a name for himself. The temporary nickname Nido had offered him, "Golden One," came out of them sounding more like "Gidiwi."

He seemed nervous of the human colony on the south side of the island and Nido couldn't imagine why. Sure, they crawled into everything and they'd stick up a hive anywhere—they'd even built one over Nido's volcano while he was asleep, some of the remains still clung to the rim around the crater—but they didn't carry diseases, they weren't venomous, they ate more dangerous parasites, and they made such surprisingly complicated hives. Nido even knew people who'd domesticated whole colonies of them. They'd make drawings of their owners that were several times larger than them! Nido didn't want the responsibility of training and taking care of a whole colony, but he thought the wild humans on his island were charming little critters. But the golden one didn't. He was always watching them and he was meticulous about knocking their dainty new hives off of the freshest layer of volcanic rock. Why? Did he think they were going to _damage_ the rock? It was _rock_; Nido could make more. Did he think they were going to bite him? Even as thin as his skin was, surely he couldn't think they'd be able to pierce it?

And that was another thing: even as thin as his skin was, he wasn't doing anything to thicken it. Nido had very nearly resorted to dragging the golden one into his nest to try to build up his armor (admittedly, just one of several motives for trying to get him into his nest); and even once the golden one had gotten there, he'd acted reluctantly to get in the lava. In the lava! Like he thought it was dangerous! What did he think it was, _water?_ He would barely dip his feet and tails in it, and he always kept his wings hiked high so the lava couldn't touch them. He was never going to build up any sort of armor like that. No wonder he was so naked.

And yet, for all that, the golden one wasn't unhealthy. He was fast, he was agile, he had powerful wings—_wow_, did he have powerful wings, yesterday he'd shot up into the sky like the fastest thing Nido had ever seen. (Nido knew the golden one was showing off; he was mainly flattered to be chosen as the target.) He was the strongest warrior Nido had ever fought—possibly the strongest on the planet. There wasn't a thing about him that seemed sickly or frail. He was just...

He was just _weird_.

Particularly after yesterday's... whatever that was.

Nido didn't typically patrol his territory only a couple days apart. He'd been doing it more frequently since waking up, yes, but that was because he'd been asleep for so long and needed to relearn the lay of his land. He'd been about ready to settle back into his usual schedule: once or twice a month, a little less than monthly during winter. But even though he'd last patrolled just the day before yesterday, he found himself circling his island again, needing to get away from the golden one and trying clear his head enough to make sense of what had happened. From this far out, he could distantly see his island over one wing, and the golden one crawling around in the trees in that odd way he had of getting down on his wings; and, over Nido’s other wing, there was that flicker of gold.

Yesterday.

Yesterday, the golden one had finally touched Nido, for the first time since he'd had been wounded. The touch had almost started out the same—a forehead pressed to his chest—but then...

The sun was blessedly hot and bright today; but unpleasantly muggy, which spoiled it a bit. No doubt from the unusual storm yesterday. Nido tried to focus on the sun and the clear blue sky, rather than the glimpses of gold on his wing and island.

After yesterday—after the strange way the golden one had touched him—for the first time, Nido felt nervous around him. Before, he’d been sure that he understood what the golden one really wanted from him; and now he wasn’t. He wasn't even confident anymore that the golden one was actually a tragically mutated member of Nido’s own species. If he forced himself to look past the wings and speed, paying attention to the rest—the scales, the fanged snouts, the long limber length of him, the way rain followed him—he had far more in common, didn't he, with the monsters that slithered deep beneath the waves, the kind that crept on islands in the night to eat _his_ kind in their sleep...

Nido hadn't slept well last night.

But they'd slept on the same island for so many nights now—if the golden one had wanted to eat him, surely he would have by now. That couldn't be what he was after, right?

Right?

Or did Nido just _want_ to believe that? Could he trust his own judgment on the golden one? After the _other_ thing that happened yesterday—when...

He needed to get away from his island—get somewhere he couldn't always see the golden one glimmering in his peripheral vision. Get somewhere he could talk to somebody else.

He spiraled back down to his island, landed on the volcano’s rim, and called, "Hey!" Not that he needed to. The golden one was watching him long before he landed—one head following Nido's every move, another watching him askance. Sometimes he wondered at how those heads seemed to act separately from each other.

But never mind that now. It was time for another vocabulary lesson.

"Look." He picked up a rock—that got all three heads' rapt attention—and dropped it right at his feet. It rolled partway down the volcano's side. "Near." He picked up another rock, and tossed it away from the volcano, into the trees close to the golden one. "Far." He patiently waited to see if the golden one understood.

And as Nido watched the golden one puzzle through the new words, one head focusing on the rock on the volcano and the other peering through the trees for the one that had landed next to him, he thought to himself: how could the golden one be a threat? He couldn't be. Not when he was so enthusiastic to learn to speak, so attentive to everything Nido said, so eager to receive more.

After—amusingly—exchanging a glance with _himself_, the golden one apparently had drawn his conclusions. Uncertainly, one head bent down to pull up a tree, roots and all, while another asked, "Fire?"

"No. No." Nido wasn't a teacher, how did other people do this? He tried again, dropping another rock by his feet: "Near." Tossing a second into the trees: "Far." And then, reeling back, chucking a third as far as he could, so that it landed on the coast: "Faaar."

The golden one perked up, making a noise of comprehension that sounded something like "_Ihi_." He searched the trees for the rock, picked up, and dropped it straight back down. "Niear." That almost sounded right. He picked it back up, tossed it, and whipped around his tail to smack it. The spined cluster at the end of his tail rattled. The rock soared off into the distance.

So exaggeratedly drawn out it was almost funny, he said, "Fiii-_iii_-iiire."

The golden one looked up at Nido, waiting for a judgment. Nido couldn't quite get his beak to shut. He didn't see where the rock splashed down. He was mildly worried it was heading for orbit.

Right. That tail could take off Nido's head with one blow. Good to know.

"... Good. Far." They'd have to work on the golden one's pronunciation, but he clearly understood the concept. That was the important part.

He hopped down the volcano to meet the golden one. "Nido, fly far. _Far far_ far." He felt like an idiot, using this hatchling talk; but they had such a small pool of words they both knew...

"What far?" the golden one asked.

Hoo. West across the continent, the ocean, and to the next continent. They hadn't covered "continents" yet, of course. Or directions. "Up," he said, kicking a rock westward demonstratively.

"... Up?" The golden one uncertainly tipped a couple of heads upward toward the sky, the other looking at him quizzically.

Nido flung out his wings irritably, for a moment unable to stick to the limited vocabulary they'd built up together. "_No_, you poor thing, the _other_ up, _navigationally_." There was no chance the golden one understood him.

He seemed to understand the exasperation, though, because he huffed a burst of lightning that crackled out in the air between them.

Try again. "_Up_. Up. _Up_. Up." Nido flung alternating rocks toward the sky and toward the west. Same word for both directions.

The golden one watched him, tips of his tails twitching back and forth so they rattled faintly. After a moment of contemplation, he pointed east and said, dubiously, "Down?"

"Good," Nido said, relieved. "Fly up, far far. Back..." No, he hadn't taught the golden one "back" yet. How do you communicate the concept of "having returned after being somewhere else" by chucking rocks? "Nido nest," he said tentatively, "sun... down."

"Sun down?" The golden one pointed east.

Well. He'd be back before _dawn_, certainly. But the golden one was right; Nido had meant to indicate the sun would be on the other side of the world, "down" if you were looking down toward the ground, but the sun could never _really_ be down, could it? No matter where it was related to you, the sun was always upwards. At nighttime, _you_ were down, not the sun. Nido would just confuse the golden one if he tried to insist that the sun could, in fact, be down.

Nido squawked in irritation. He'd kill for a rock big enough to use as a globe right now. He should make one tomorrow. "Sun... far up," rock kick to indicate west, "near down," a kick east.

The golden one considered that, then said slowly, "Sky...?" And stopped, apparently lacking the next word.

Was he trying to ask about night? "Dark?"

"Dark?" He ducked his heads, holding a wing over them to shade them from the light.

"Dark. Good." Okay. They'd solved that. "Fly far. Nido nest, sky dark."

"Good." The golden one flopped down among the trees, wings and feet tucked under his body, as if to suggest that he'd patiently wait right there until Nido returned.

The pose looked so impossibly uncomfortable, pinning his own limbs under the weight of his body—and yet he seemed perfectly content in it. His limbs almost vanished like that. It made him look even more unfamiliarly serpentine.

Nido's exuberance over taking another step forward with communication vanished as he was reminded, once again, that he wasn't quite sure what was living in his home.

###

The landscape below was so different from what Nido had expected it to be when he was born. Islands had become continents, land bridges had disappeared, volcanoes risen and fallen. In minute ways, it was different even from what it had been the last time he was awake.

The volcanic trail, at least, was consistent.

As Nido flew west toward the Pacific Plate, the ocean appeared above him; and from there the volcanic trail curved right, almost all the way to the world's rightmost point, the axis around which it turned; and then curved around to the left again. The wind switched direction several times as he followed the trail, pushing him west, east, and west again; which direction the wind pushed told him how close he was getting to the axis as reliably as the temperature did. 

It would be much faster to reach his destination by flying straight across the ocean; but far more nerve wracking. By following the volcanic trail, he always had land to his right wing, even if if it was only islands. And anyway, it ultimately got him where he was going.

Infant Island.

Of all the people in this world, most of whom he knew personally, there was no particular reason why she-of-Infant-Island had to be the one he talked to. He’d chosen her for two reasons. Her island was along the volcanic trail, which he hadn't had a chance to explore since before he'd hibernated, and he needed to see what islands had risen or fallen since then. And he wanted to see how Infant herself was doing, both because he liked to check up on her from time to time—alone as she was—and because she'd taken the worst damage out of everyone during their brawl, and her usual method for recovering from serious wounds was "just curl up and die."

He outpaced the sun as he flew, watching it fall behind him toward the eastern horizon, such that it was barely dawn by the time he reached Infant Island. He wondered a few times what he'd do if it turned out Infant _had_ died and was between reincarnations, or if she was currently at one of her other homes scattered nearby. But there she was on a low hill. He announced his approach, and felt her prod at his mind as he spiraled down to her island.

Several humans scattered out of the way as he claimed a perch near Infant. "Hey—"

_What do you want?_

Her thought came across far sharper than Nido had expected—not quite openly hostile but hyper guarded, like she was ready to lash out if he made any false move. He leaned back, surprised. "To hang out," he said, which was technically honest if not leaving out a bit. He wanted perspective, more than anything else; but you got perspective through hanging out, and if hanging out was all he accomplished he'd still consider it worth the round trip.

_After that battle?_ She thought it like she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to hang out after such a fight.

"Sure!" He said it like he couldn't imagine why anyone _wouldn't_ want to hang out after such a fight.

He could feel her pressing into his mind, checking his thoughts and emotions—it felt like the psychic equivalent of getting his face squeezed in her front legs and turned back and forth while she inspected him. He politely endured the mental manhandling. _Nido... what were we fighting over, exactly?_

Nido squawked in surprised amusement. "You don't know? _You_ don't know why were were fighting?" he cried. "Good! I thought I was the only one but I didn't want to ask."

He could finally feel some of the tension surrounding Infant dissipate. She relaxed, settling down. ____

"I've almost recovered. I didn't know you could do that, that was a good move." He spread his arms, puffing out his chest, showing the gnarled black stone over his wound. "How's your damage?"

She gave him a baleful look, and spread her wings. Wing.

"Oh." He scrunched his neck down apologetically. "I didn't do all that, did I?" He _could_ have—he didn't hold much back in a fight—but he didn't remember leaving that kind of damage.

She folded what remained of her wings back down. _No. They did._ Three heads and golden scales. Filtered through Infant's memories, he looked even more unfamiliar.

Nido shuffled on his perch a moment, uncomfortable. "That's a bit far," he conceded. "I guess you can get a new pair, but he should've stopped sooner."

_I don't want to use up another egg for it_, she thought tiredly. _We've got an idea to fix it, anyway_. And Nido automatically knew—in the way you automatically knew things when you were talking to Infant—that by "we," she meant "me and _him_."

Him.

Nido didn't know that one's real name. He was certainly never going to ask. He was some ambassador from the freakish denizens of the dark seas to the people above, and the fact that he had legs didn't do anything to dispel the sense of fishiness about him. If he had a nest—a home—Nido didn't know where or what it was. So knowing only that he constantly circled through the oceans, Nido nicknamed him after the deepest, darkest, coldest part of the ocean.

He called him Mariana.

"Oh," Nido said uncomfortably, scanning the horizon for any sign of Mariana. Where Infant was, Mariana was rarely too far—Nido had hatched knowing that. "That's good."

He could feel her amusement, but she took mercy and changed the topic. _What _do_ you know about why we were fighting?_

"Nothing," he lamented. "The golden one thrashed me on my own turf, so I was following him around, as you do—"

_As you do_, she agreed genially.

"—and I thought we were just going to check out that weird noise that sounded like someone screaming over and over, but then _you_ two showed up, and—well, if there's fighting going on, I'm not going to say _no_." Even if Mariana _was_ there.

_He wasn't forcing you to go?_

Nido clicked his beak a couple of times, somewhat affronted. "You've known more of my kind than me, you should know better! The winners don't _force_ the losers to follow them around. It's a _mutual_ arrangement." He explained all this with great dignity. "The winner won't even _let_ the loser follow them around unless they've proven they're strong despite the loss. They part ways unless they're both impressed by the other." He said all this with the confidence of someone who'd learned this years ago, rather than someone who'd only sort of figured it out by instinct in the days after it had suddenly become relevant to his life.

She had a feeling about her like he hadn't answered the question she'd been trying to ask, but she'd found the answer she'd been looking for anyway. The air around her head thickened as she brooded over something. Nido scooted a little away to give her room to think.

And, in doing so, he caught sight of her injured wing again. He looked at the ground, and pecked at an odd-looking rock to see how it tasted. Bleh.

"It got rougher than I was expecting," he admitted. "I don't know if the golden one and Mariana were settling some kind of grudge, or if it was a turf thing... or if that's just how they _always_ fight..." He tipped a head dismissively. "Mariana doesn't spar for fun, though, does he?"

_They have a history._

"I'm not surprised." They seemed like it.

What kind of history, though, Nido wondered?

He thought again about how, now that he'd noticed it, the golden one looked alarmingly like a sea monster. The kind he'd hatched knowing to fear but had never actually seen before. Was that how he and Mariana knew each other? Some underwater grudge they'd taken onto land? Why did he even have _wings_, then, if...?

Infant was staring at him.

"What?"

_You're worried about something. Is that why you came?_

"No! No no no. Not at all," he lied. "Are my thoughts getting into your personal space? I can scoot away—"

_Hold still._ She crept up to his side, reaching for his head.

"It's fine," he insisted; but he held still, and he flinched but didn't draw back when she tapped his head. Because although he didn't want to think about it—and he _definitely_ didn't want to talk about it—nevertheless, he wanted somebody to know:

Yesterday, the golden one had terrified him.

He had caressed Nido's wings, his back, his chest, the way you were only supposed to caress the one you were mating with—the one you _knew_ you were mating with. As though they had been lovers for years. He had done so while pressed chest to chest with him, his face pressed to the wrong side of his throat, everything backwards and unnatural and strange, as uncanny as trying to mate upside-down.

He had licked him—_licked_ him!—like he wanted to see how he tasted before eating him, and had tested his teeth against his hide. He had coiled around him, like he was constricting him, like he was preparing to crush. Like the things that crept out of the ocean to wrap around his kind, squeeze them to death, and swallow them whole.  


None of it added up. What was it the golden one wanted? Did he want to mate with Nido—did, through some incomprehensible delusion, he think he _had been_ Nido's mate for ages now—or did he want to _eat_ him?

And was Nido himself in any fit state to figure out which it was?

Could he trust his own judgment?

Because that was the thing. The other thing that scared him.

There had been that moment, just after—everything. Once he'd been untangled and had corralled the golden one into a more appropriate level of physical contact for their current level of barely-knew-each-other relationship. When he'd seen the imprints that the golden one had left on him (was that the point of the strange touches, maybe? no, no, it couldn't be, you don't need to lick to leave imprints), when Nido had butted the golden one’s forehead—  


For a moment, he'd felt—something he hadn't felt before, an emotion he couldn't quite identify, but that reminded him a lot of what he thought love was probably supposed to feel like.

That scared him as much as anything else. Because it didn't feel _right_. It didn't feel like _him_. It felt too fast, unnaturally fast; it felt undeserved and unjustified; it felt pasted on to emotions that were nowhere near that place yet. The feeling had appeared and fluttered away again, like infrequent sunbeams peeking through clouds; and he hadn’t felt it later when he looked at the golden one, and he didn't feel it now. So why had he felt it _then?_

And could Nido trust his own judgment on the golden one, really, if he was somehow already in love with him and hadn't realized it?

Infant stepped back. _Oh_.

The "oh" wasn't something that could be translated into any words; it was an emotion by itself, a sense of sudden realization. It made Nido think of the "_ihi_" sound the golden one made when he figured out a new word.

Infant's thoughts tumbled stormily around her head for a moment; but before long, she asked, _Do you know that they're... like me?_

And the moment she asked, he realized that yes, he _did_ know that. After their first fight, the golden one had flapped his way over to Nido's nest, sat down, and issued him a second challenge: a roar that inserted panic into his mind the same way that Infant inserted her thoughts into his mind. With the battle and the injury and the days of recovery, he'd utterly forgotten to wonder about that—but it _was_ a wonder, wasn't it? It had been so easy for that lone roar to slip his mind, he supposed, because the golden one had been so mute after the battle.

"Yes. He's shown me." He clicked irritably. "_Once_. I can't believe he's been watching me make a fool of myself trying to explain _language_ to him when he could just communicate directly the whole time."

_You've been teaching them language?_

A sardonic caw. "If you can call it teaching! You should have seen me trying to explain the difference between 'rain' and 'water.'" He could feel her prying around for the memory. He let her have it. There was a lot of memory there. It had been a protracted discussion.

_They're probably weaker at it than me_, Infant thought. _They don't seem to be able to send messages. They can only send emotions—or change other people's. And it's strongest when they touch. You understand?_

He thought about it. A chill ran up his back. Oh. "Yes."

_You're worried about what they're doing on your island. So am I. If they're trying to change your emotions... _She left off with only a vague sense of unease, letting his own imagination conjure up the implications.

He brushed the implications off. "No. I don't think so."

His answer—and his confidence—surprised her. _How can you be so sure after this? You know very little about them._

Yeah, well. That was the problem, wasn't it? That was why he was here. "You know more?"

He could _feel_ that she did, and then he felt that knowledge closing off from him. She didn't want _him_ to know.

Which meant her knowledge was useless to him, wasn't it? Even if he was dying to know. (He wondered if it was that the golden one was a sea serpent.) Sullenly, he said, "I'm sure."

_Then you think those really are your emotions?_

"No way! But he's not trying to change my emotions, either." He bent forward, stretching his wings, preparing to take off again. If Infant was holding information back now, then there wasn’t much reason to hang out any longer, was there? "I'll visit again soon. It's good to talk to someone who can talk back."

He could feel Infant sifting through a dozen different thoughts she wanted to throw at him; but finally, she settled on, _Be careful around them._

"I will." How could he not, after being _licked?_ He took off, cried a farewell, circled the island, and headed back out toward sea.

###

He took the scenic route home, stopping every once in a while to check on volcanoes that he could tell held still-incubating eggs to see how they were coming along—dawdling, more or less. He'd promised the golden one that he'd be back after nightfall and didn't want to come back too early. The sun appeared to roll unnaturally fast across the sky as he flew east; by the time he could see his own dark ocean glittering in the distance, the last light had faded from the sky behind him.

The golden one was curled up on the ground, of course, like a fool who didn't know what a nest was for. His heads were huddled around some glowing lights that the humans had set up near the edge of their colony, using them to illuminate a chunk of human-made detritus that a couple of them were gnawing at determinedly. So ridiculous—so endlessly ridiculous. That was a perfectly good way to crack their beaks—er—their teeth? their teeth.

"Hey!" He fluttered down to land next to the golden one, who stood with a hiss and used a wing to block the worst of the wind from his landing from blowing onto the human colony. That was more concern than he usually showed for them. "Hey. Down."

"Down," the golden one affirmed, glancing toward the east to show that he still remembered his lesson.

Which was great to see, but not what Nido was looking for. "Golden one down."

He puzzled over that a moment, then slowly lowered his heads until they were about even with Nido’s. Nido leaned forward and, just as he'd done yesterday, butted the middle head.

Except this time Nido didn't immediately pull back. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, pressing into the touch, keeping their foreheads together. And there, again, blossoming in his mind and welling in his heart as clearly as though it was his own, was the emotion he'd felt yesterday. The love—not-quite-love—love-ish thing. He could feel it pounding in his chest, fluttering in his stomach, and trickling down lower. It felt like something new and frightening, something uncertain and overwhelming, something as overpowering as it was fragile. Like a plant that had shot up too high too fast, a sapling as tall as a tree but still spindly and green and threatening to break under its own weight. For a moment he got lost in the emotion, exploring it.

But he wasn't actually trying to see what the emotion was. He was trying to see what the golden one _did_ about the fact that he saw.

Inside the too-tall-too-fast proto-love, something bubbled up like the giddiness that came from being in free fall and unable to breathe; and then something awful and unsafe shot through it, as abrupt as a bubble popping, alarm-panic-fear-danger-_anger_. The golden one jerked back, getting on his feet and raising his wings threateningly.

That was what Nido had needed to see. If the golden one had been trying to control _Nido’s_ emotions, then he would have kept at it, wouldn't he? Kept pressing in, kept pushing those emotions on him. But he'd pulled back. He wasn't feeding Nido false emotions; Nido was picking up the _golden one's_ emotions.

The golden one wasn't happy about it.

The golden one _really_ wasn't happy about it.

Two heads snapped forward into the human-made light to shriek a warning at Nido, while the middle withdrew into darkness. Nido cawed a counter-warning back. He wasn't about to be threatened on his own island. The golden one’s left head raised and curved forward to loom high over Rodan, as though to provide a long-range tactical view of the fight; and the right head hissed, lashing out, jaws open to bite. Nido flapped up, talons ready to catch the attack and return it—when the middle head struck, fangs tearing into his own right throat.

A wing hit Nido, just a glancing blow, but enough to knock him away. He tumbled to the ground, scrambled to his feet, and hopped backwards out of range. Writhing in and out of the light, the golden one wrestled with himself, two heads hissing and snapping at each other, the third weaving between and curling around their necks as if to strangle them both. He tumbled to the ground, hissing and shrieking and screaming at himself, and for the life of him Nido didn't know what to do about it but stand there with his wings half-raised like an idiot wondering whether this was a fight he was supposed to be getting involved in.

It resolved itself in a few seconds with the golden one slamming himself on his side, right head cracking against the ground with the middle jaw locked around its throat. Panting, the left head surveyed them—then looked up at Nido.

And Nido kept standing there. Like an idiot. Lamely, he said, "Sorry." He didn't know what he'd done wrong—all he'd done was hurry up their communication, hadn't he? Was the fact that the golden one was into him supposed to be _secret?_ It couldn't be. Yesterday he'd been nuzzling Nido's _back_, he wasn't exactly subtle.

The head that had been nuzzling him yesterday was the one pinned to the ground, wheezing and struggling. Why was he attacking himself?

"... Stop. Stop—" Had they covered that word? Nido didn't think so. He hopped closer, speaking to the middle head: "_Up_. Get up. Get off of— What are you _doing_, you're just hurting yourself—"

The left head hissed, snapping at him. Nido took to the air, clawing at his face. "_No!_ I don't know what's going on, but you're _not_ going to tear yourself up on my island! If it's _me_ you want to fight, then—"

"_Stop._"

Nido froze except for his wings. _Had_ they covered "stop" after all, or had the golden one picked it up just now?

The golden one gingerly let his right head up and stumbled unsteadily to his feet. He moved like he was inebriated; his motions were exaggerated, off-balance, and uncoordinated. "Nido nest." His voices were tight. "Gidiwi far."

Nido had _really_ messed up. "No, no no no—" He landed. "Far bad. Golden one, nest. Near. Golden one nest?"

The golden one ignored him. His takeoff today wasn't half as graceful as it was yesterday—but it was still strong enough to threaten to blow Nido off his feet. He had to hunker down to protect himself from the gust.

And then the golden one was just a silhouette against the stars, high in the sky, heading south.

How much worse would he make things by following the golden one?

The golden one's silhouette faded as the stars disappeared behind newly-forming clouds. Cold rain began to drizzle.

Nido spread his wings.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/186671898847/weird). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!
> 
> Next fic coming up Tuesday!


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